The Delightful Design Details in Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water

Sally Hawkins in a scene from Shape of Water. The window arch was directly inspired by one in 1948’s The Red Shoes

By Kerry Hayes/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.

If you ever doubted Guillermo del Toro’s love for film, all you need to do is see The Shape of Water, his romantic monster movie steeped in cinema references. The film’s protagonist, Elisa, (played by Sally Hawkins) lives a lonely-yet-dreamy existence above a picturesque movie theater—the flickering lights and sounds emanating up through her floorboards. Every time she arrives or exits, she dashes up or down a staircase lit by the theater’s old-fashioned marquee. Her apartment features an awesome arched window inspired directly by one in The Red Shoes, the 1948 British drama starring Moira Shearer, which del Toro counts among his favorite films—an interior-design homage the filmmaker specifically requested from production designer Paul D. Austerberry. Although you would never notice it upon first viewing, Elisa’s beloved shoes are even stored on racks designed to hold film-reel cases. Those poignant details marry the fetishes of filmmaker and protagonist—film and shoes—in a design flourish del Toro and Austerberry rationalized by imagining that Elisa lives in the cinema’s converted storage space.

Del Toro had been dreaming up The Shape of Water for six or seven years before bringing Austerberry on board to realize his vision—long enough for del Toro to handpick locations around his home of Toronto, like the Massey Hall performing-arts theater, which doubles as the movie theater Elisa lives above. Though del Toro initially wanted The Shape of Water to be filmed in black and white, Austerberry says that the production was offered more funding for a color creation. And the detail-oriented director took the added dimension very seriously.

“The first day that we had a production office, Guillermo brought in a huge box full of Benjamin Moore paint samples—3,500 colors total,” remembered Austerberry. “We literally went through every single one of them, because Guillermo is very aware of and specific about color—with costumes, the sets, everything. We went through the colors and he would say, ‘Elisa’s color,’ ‘Strickland’s color,’ ‘Giles’s color.’ By the end, we had picked 100 colors from this box of 3,500.”

Left, by Kerry Hayes/Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation; Right, from Granada International/REX/Shutterstock.

“Guillermo wanted cyan and dark blues and blue greens—the more obvious, water-related colors—to be the palette for Elisa’s character and her world,” said Austerberry. “When you go across the hall to Giles’s apartment [Giles is played by Richard Jenkins], he is a little more old-fashioned, so his palette is earthier—warm, mustards, greenish mustard browns. Octavia Spencer’s character, Zelda, is in the same range of characters, so has similar colors. We used an accent of red for Elisa’s character, but very sparingly—the red shoes she sees and loves, a special moment with her and the creature (Doug Jones) embracing in the theater in front of a movie playing.”

Once del Toro had decided on the palette, Austerberry got to work on Elisa’s apartment—choosing a hand-printed, Japanese-influenced wallpaper featuring a fish-scale-like pattern that had been replicated from the late 1800s.

“Everything in her world we wanted to somehow be defined by or literally shaped by water,” said Austerberry, pointing out that even the apartment trim featured Japanese woodcuts of fish. “We played up the gaps in her floorboards so that we could have light emanating from the theater below—this flickering, caustic light that emulates the way light shines through or reflects off water. The roof in her apartment is damaged, so there is water dripping through the ceiling in about eight or nine different leaks—dripping into pots on the floor. There are huge water stains on the walls, water wear in the kitchen.”

The other star set in Elisa’s apartment is her bathroom—where she keeps the creature after rescuing it from the laboratory where she works. One of the film’s most stunning visuals, seen also in The Shape of Water’s poster, arrives when Elisa floods her bathroom and she and the creature embrace underwater. Austerberry created the set from an early sketch del Toro had commissioned, with his team building one part of the set from metal—and covered with oil paint—so that the piece of the bathroom set could be submerged in a tank of water for an entire day of shooting.

“At the very beginning of this process, Guillermo sent me a picture—which didn’t really relate to anything specifically—but it was a really blue rough wall from a photographer in India. It was really worn and had efflorescing stains, and he wanted the main wall in Elisa’s apartment to look similar—like a worn piece of art,” said Austerberry. “We could have stained the wall haphazardly, but I wanted to make it something more purposeful. To me, Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa is one of the most famous literal shapes of water I’ve seen—it’s that famous wood cut in Japan, with the crashing wave curling over. We laid out the image roughly on the wall, with the waves literally crashing over the entrance door. It was really obvious at first, but we layered craft peeling paint over it, different stains and washes, and it just faded back into the wall. You couldn’t tell it’s there unless you know what you’re looking for.”